But once
a year do the flames of Holi rise.But once is the dice rolled and the
garlands of lamps lit.Yet, come to the tavern people of the
world and behold,

Where
every day is Holi, a every night Diwali.

The verse above is
extracted from the poem Madhushala penned by the celebrated Hindustani poet
Harivansh Rai Bachchan. Drawing from the tropes of Islamic mysticism, while
using the trope of alcohol, the tavern and worldly excess, the poem was in fact
intended to be a mystical allusion to the exercise of finding truth in the
world.

Poor Bachchan, up in
heaven, must probably be thanking his stars that he wrote the poem when he did,
because he would have probably been at a loss to find the appropriate metaphors
in a day and age when every day is treated as Holi and every night Diwali.

In an age of
consumerist excess, especially in the urban world, we seem to have forgotten
the meaning and the existence of the darkness of the night. The beauty of
Diwali of yore was that the lamps that were lit could be read as an invitation
to philosophical contemplation; a testament to the power of nature, the
determination of the human being to overcome the challenges of nature, and an
invitation to recognize that overwhelming nature made human existence itself
bare.

Unfortunately,
however, like so much of Hinduism, Diwali too is being held hostage by the
forces of the Hindu right. I am referring in particular to a post from Dr.Subramanian Swamy that suggested that the pleas that Diwali be marked by a
restrained use of fireworks was one more conspiracy against Hindus. His
argument was that given that the larger amount of noxious gases are released by
industries and automobiles, one should really not create a problem about the
pollution caused by fireworks on a single day’s celebration.

As usual Swamy misses the point, that the point is not about the amount of
pollution, but about the concentration of it in a single evening. If only the
noise and smoke were restricted to a single evening though! Further, Swamy
seems to not see that given the Diwali occurs just once a year, the fact of
abjuring noise and smoke pollution would make a powerful symbol that would aid
our tackling with other pollutions through the rest of the year.

Suggesting to some
neighbours that we hold a Diwali celebration without fireworks, a neighbor
responded “Diwali without fireworks is like Holi
without colour or Christmas without Santa!” I was struck by the comment since,
as Bachchan observed in his poem, Diwali was originally about the strings of
lights, not of noise. What made her response odd was that Santa Claus can
hardly be seen as integral to Christmas. Indeed, some Christians would argue
that the problem is that the emphasis in our consumerist times has shifted from
the infant Jesus to Santa Claus.

Given that this Christmas-is-about-Christ-not-Santa
argument is often articulated by right-wing Christians, I am hesitant to
endorse it totally. I endorse it only to the extent that despite the fact that
Santa Claus is the tool through which Christmas has become more than just a
Christian festival, it has also become the symbol of the consumerist excess
that has demolished the potency of Christmas as a festival of hope and sharing.

A better example that one could give when
arguing for a softer Diwali is that eschewing crackers would perhaps make it a
more moral festival. It would assert celebrations that are based not on selfish
pleasure and the assertion of privilege, but the assertion of a politics of
justice. After all this is what the politics of Diwali is made out to be isn’t
it? The politics of a just Diwali would be a politics that asserts that noisy
crackers are a violence on those who are not bursting the crackers, those who
are old and infirm. The abjuring of crackers would make a statement in favour
of labour and against the perilous conditions, often endured by children, in
which most crackers in India are produced.

The search for the morality in our
celebrations of Diwali would perhaps also awaken us to the moral economy of the
festival. This moral economy suggests that excess is best appreciated when it
occurs as an aberration. A festival of lights loses relevance when our every
night obliterates all form of natural darkness. A reference to nature would
also suggest that it is against the background of nature that excess can be
ideally judged. The moonless night (Amavasya) of the month of Kartik is held to
be the darkest night of the year, and it against this darkness that the brave
lights of Diwali shine forth. This could be argued to be the context of Diwali.
Lose this context of darkness and one loses the meaning of the festival itself.

I have often thought that the lamps of
Diwali offer a remarkable statement of bravery in the face of vulnerability,
possibly from a recognition of the fact that those brave lights last only so
long as their oil, and only as long the wind does not snuff them out. A shift
of emphasis away from these oil (or wax) lamps, to electricity and noise shifts
the emphasis away from resolute vulnerability to rude assertion. It is perhaps
for this reason that members of the Hindu right would prefer that Diwali be
celebrated with the violent assertions of noise and absolute assertion of
masculine power over the softness of the autumn night.

Whichever way you choose to celebrate
Diwali, however, Diwali Mubarak.

Friday, October 3, 2014

Like thousands
of middle class and urban persons of my generation who loved to read, my
childhood was marked by a devouring of literature in the English language. Especially through the works of Enid Blyto, I became familiar with the cultural worlds of the English. However, I also had access to the illustrated stories of Amar Chitra Katha.
Through the tales of this publishing house I grew up to know the many
narratives that populate the Puranas, the Hindu epics, and various episodes
from subcontinental history. This reading grew in importance as I began to pick
up on the subtle nationalist messages that form part of growing up in India.
The message was that it was important to know our fables, stories and histories, not merely those from across the
waters.

As I grew older,
however, I realised that my knowledge of our narratives was rather curiously limited. While I could easily rattle off the genealogies
of the Raghu Vamsha I did not have as deep a knowledge of similar religious traditions
within the subcontinent. In time I realised that this was not a coincidence but
a part of the way in which Indian nationalism is configured. Religious
traditions of brahmanical Hinduism are constructed as national mythology, while
other narratives and mythologies are cast as foreign. This is the basis of what
one could call banal Hindutva.

For those who
fear it, Hindutva is largely associated with the violence, whether it is overt
violence, or violent posturing or assertion. This is just one part of Hindutva,
however. Violent Hindutva is able to succeed and be condoned largely because it
rests on the daily operation of banal Hindutva. This Hindutva ensures that by
and large our references are from within the oeuvre of brahmanical tradition,
or Indian nationalist interpretations of cultural traditions within the
subcontinent. By depriving us of other referents, it is as if this Hindutva
casts a spell where we are unable to imagine ways to challenge its operation.

On realising
this I figured that one route to challenging the operation of banal Hindutva
would rest on uncovering and popularising subcontinental narratives from
outside the brahmanical tradition. One obvious place to go searching for these
narratives was the subcontinent’s Islamicate tradition. From within this
tradition, I ran into the Dastan e Amir Hamza a number of times, the first of which was a short version of the tale published by the Khudha Baksh Oriental Library. More recently, I had the opportunity to go
through a more substantial translation of the text by Musharraf Ali Farooqi.

The dastan, or tale, is woven around the fantastic
adventures of Hamza, an uncle of the Prophet Muhammad. In the course of his
travels across a broad swathe of the globe, as well as other dimensions, Hamza
battles kings in their kingdoms, sorcerers and their spells (tilism) and other supernatural
creatures. While Hamza often converts noble adversaries to Islam after
defeating them, the narrative itself is not a theological or religious
discourse. Indeed, decorated with tales of magic, romance and cunning, I am
given to believe that more pedantic Muslims would shirk away from the narrative
as un-Islamic.

If the intention
of exploring Islamicate wonderlands is to expose the Indian reader to a wider
cultural landscape, then the dastan is a wonderful choice. I was delighted by
the sheer geographic scale of the narrative, that casually incorporates Hind (the
subcontinent of south Asia), Ceylon, Persia, Greece, China into the narrative. In many ways the dastan is true to Indian tradition in that it makes
unselfconscious references to Alexander exploits. While Alexander may have
reached the limits of his adventures in the Punjab, his exploits fundamentally
reordered the cultural universe of the world from that time. While the Persian
empire was already a standard that even subcontinental monarchs looked up to,
Alexander’s incursions made the cultural references of the subcontinent even
more complex. That contemporary Indians are ignorant of these complex cultures
is testament to the manner in which banal Hindutva has stripped our world of
cultural diversity. A further testament to the Dastan’s richness is the manner
in which narratives that one finds in the Ramayana, such as Rama’s breaking of
Parashurama’s bow, also seem to emerge, albeit under modified circumstances, in
the same text.

As interesting
as the Dastan may be, however, and even though in recent times there has been a rediscovery of the subcontinent’s dastan tradition, it is not ready for
uncritical embrace. Merely because it is Islamicate is not going to allow the
dastan to challenge Hindutva or be an acceptable alternative. The dastan as it
now stands is filled with a variety of racist, patriarchal and casteist
formulations. Take, for example, the manner in which Hamza’s companion and
friend from birth, Amar, is constantly humiliated because of the latter’s low
birth. Further, it appears that it is only figures of “low birth” who engage in
morally dubious activities, even if it is to further Hamza’s noble pursuits. Or
the instances where Hamza is persuaded to enjoy the charms of other women,
while his first love, Mehr Nigar, pines chastely for him for decades.

But perhaps it
is because there is much that needs to be weeded out of the Dastan that it may
present itself as an interesting and exciting task in the battle against banal
Hindutva. Hindutva is not the only ideology in the country that rests of a
thick melange of racism, patriarchy, casteism and other dehumanising systems.
As local readers would know these systems are as present within the
institutional Church in Goa, as they are in other religious and secular
institutions. All of these institutions work with banal Hindutva on a daily
basis, by and large protesting only when violent Hindutva pinches their
immediate interests. Reformulating the Dastan, and other narratives, both from
within the subcontinent as well as outside, would perhaps present a more
dynamic challenge in reinventing the country to make it more inclusive. And who
knows, in challenging the sorcerers that would modify the secular democratic
republic into the tilism of Hindutva, we may well stand to become the Hamza of
our age.

About Me

Itinerant mendicant captures two aspects of my life perfectly. My educational formation has seen me traverse various terrains, geographical as well as academic. After a Bachelor's in law from the National Law School of India, I worked for a while in the environmental and developmental sector. After a Master's in the Sociology of Law, I obtained a Doctorate in Anthropology in Lisbon for my study of the citizenship experience of Goan Catholics. I am currently a post-doctoral researcher at the Centre for Research in Anthropology at the University Institute of Lisbon, but continue to shuttle between Lisbon and Goa.
I see myself as a mendicant not only because so many of my voyages have been funded by scholarships and grants but because I will accept almost any offer for sensorial and intellectual stimulation, and thank the donor for it.
This blog operates as an archive of my writings in the popular press.